A Study Of Friends’ Humor From The Cooperative Principle

Humor is a kind of variant language. As a unique language phenomenon, it plays an active role in creating the relaxing atmosphere and loosening the mood. It is the huge numbers and high frequency of humor in situation comedies that attracts large audiences. The humor in audiovisual woks is often created by the characters’ dialogues and the actors’movement performance, such as expression and action etc. However, situation comedies are often shot in indoor scenes; actors’ movement performance is restricted by the narrow shooting space, fixed scenes, and limited camera angles so that actors are not able to perform the humor effect by their expressions and movements so freely. Hence, the characters’ humorous dialogues are one of the most important tools to achieve the humor effect and make audiences laugh in situation comedies.H.P. Grice’s Cooperative Principle (CP) and its related theories reveal language norms to guide the two sides of conversation in the process of communication. It contains a series of maxims which help both sides of the conversation to accomplish the dialogue smoothly. So the Cooperative Principle is one of the important guides for people’s speech communication. Under the guidance of CP, here comes implicating meaning, also called Conversational Implicature (CI) by Grice, when speakers violate the maxims of CP on purpose. Then, humor appears when the conversational implicature is humorous.CP, as a discipline mediating between linguistics and audiovisual criticisms, has gathered more attention in recent years from scholars in the area of audiovisual criticism as well as audiovisual studies. Since the Cooperative Principle can provide studies on speech in general with analytical and critical insights, the present thesis aims at an analytical study of Friends’ humor from the perspective of the Cooperative PrincipleWith the popularity of humor of Friends at home and abroad, it is worthwhile to apply the Cooperative Principle to the study of Friends and its humor. From the pragmatics perspective, based on Grice’s CP theory and other related theories, this thesis mainly focuses on analyses of violating the four maxims of CP in the humorous dialogues of Friends to see how humor is achieved in the sitcom. According to the framework by the author, detailed analytical studies in the four aspects of rhetorical figures and their violations of the Cooperative Principle, idioms and their violations of the Cooperative Principle, allusions and their violations of the Cooperative Principle, cultural concepts and their violations of the Cooperative Principle are carried out. How contexts of situation comedies are produced and how conversational implicatures are appreciated, are presented in dealing with humor analysis from CP theory, thereby resulting in humorous effects. This thesis also points out that for better understanding humor in the audiovisual works, audiences should apply CP theory plus context of situation to conduct analysis in order to achieve better understanding on the same humor effect as source text conveys.There are five parts to this thesis. Part One presents an introduction to the whole thesis, then an overall literature review serving as Part Two is about studies of CP and related theories home and abroad, studies of humor, studies of humor from the perspective of CP, and studies of sitcom humor from the perspective of CP in particular. The theoretical frame work of the present study and several important concepts are introduced in Part Three. In Part Four, a detail analytical study of Friends’ humor is carried out. The fifth Part gives a conclusion for the research and summarizes the significance of CP in the analysis of Friends’ humor.CP is not only a helpful tool in assessing audiovisual works, but also a major consideration in appreciating audiovisual humor. On the basis of this study, the author of this thesis found that:(1) The humor of Friends results from the violation of the Cooperative Principle. What’s more, the generation of sitcom humor is inseparable from the context;(2) The realization of humor depends on the target audiences’ acceptance. The assessment of responses of receivers of verbal humor is not only through laughter but their true understanding under the guidance of The Cooperative Principle plus context of situation.